To find out the latest news on our Inter-Library Loan Service please see our Contact and News page. There are also links on that page to other resources that you may find useful.
Please request the items you need as early as you can, and allow time for them to be sourced and delivered.
An Inter-Library Loan (ILL) is a book, journal article, or other publication which is not available from our own library stock, and which we may be able to obtain for you from another library, through the Inter-Library Loans Request Service.
If you are a Distance Learner, you may be interested in our Library Request Services for Distance Learners.
De Montfort University academic staff, visiting academics, researchers, postgraduates, and some DMU undergraduate taught course students* can use this service, as long as the item is related to their area of study or research.
DMU Academics who wish to request a journal article for teaching purposes should contact the Copyright Officer, and not use the online ILLs request form. This is because the item will not be for Individual use, so it will need to be requested in a different way and the appropriate fees paid to comply with Copyright legislation.
We are not able to offer ILLs to students or staff from our Partner Colleges but do contact your own institution's library service to see if they can obtain materials for you, or your local public library may be able to help. For more information about what we can offer you, please go to our Partner Colleges pages.
* 3rd and 4th year undergraduates at DMU can request ILLs. 1st and 2nd year DMU students may also be able to request ILLs if their Subject Librarian agrees to this.
Before you place an ILL request, please check Library Search to ensure we don't already have that book, journal, or article in our collection.
To help you find resources more effectively you could download the Lean Library extension for your browser; it's very quick to set up and then if you search on any website (e.g. online bookshop, library catalogue, or publisher) it will indicate to you whether we already have a copy of that book or journal article in our collection at DMU. This means you can access it much more quickly than through Inter-Library Loan. To find out more, take a look at our Lean Library page
Also check Google Scholar to see if the title is freely available. This will be much quicker than requesting the item through the ILL service.
To request any publication which is not already held in DMU Libraries' collections (including our online collections and subscriptions), you will need to complete an Inter-Library Loan Request form and we will try to obtain a copy for you.
Contact our Just Ask enquiry service or ask a member of library staff if you have problems logging in to your library account.
If you are eligible to obtain ILL items, there is a maximum number of ILL items you can request at any one time. Please check your entitlement limit before you place any ILL requests.
In addition, all items that you borrow or access through the ILL service are subject to Copyright restrictions.
If you find that this guide doesn't help to answer your enquiry you can get in touch with the ILLs Team.
See the Contact Us page for more assistance.
Items that we supply to you through the DMU Inter-Library Loan Service are subject to the same copyright restrictions as the resources that you use in our library, and are only to be used for personal study and research purposes.
Copyright is a complex area, so in order to keep within the law when using any information resources, please refer to our Copyright Guide.
All users of the Inter-Library Loans Service must agree to a declaration which states that the copy they are requesting is either for the purpose of non-commercial research or for non-commercial private study.
If the copy is for commercial purposes, you should not agree to the declaration. The required copy can still be obtained for you, but you will have to pay a copyright charge, in addition to the Inter-Library Loan photocopy charge. The cost of the request will be charged back to either you as the requester, or the originating department.